This is a Golden Age for health care. But at the same time new treatments and cures are being developed, Americans are properly concerned about costs. How can the health care system continue to innovate while providing value?
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Our NewsletterIssue No. 53: Comparing U.S. Health Costs With the Rest of the World
Frequent comparisons are made between health care costs in the United States and in other wealthy countries. The focus of these comparisons is nearly always pharmaceutical prices. The latest example is a report, issued by the House Ways and Means Committee staff, titled, “A Painful Pill to Swallow.” The report compared drug prices in the United States with those in Canada, Australia, Japan, and a group of Europeans countries. It concluded, “The analysis presented in this report clearly illustrates that, across the board, the U.S. spends more on drugs than other comparable developed countries.” That’s hardly a surprise. The U.S. health care system is utterly different from that of other countries, where the government is in charge and, as a monopsony buyer, can demand the prices it wants from drug manufacturers. These nationalized health systems may have the benefit of lower prices, but they create significant drawbacks. What About Innovation? The Ways and Means report sheds little new light – while casting considerable shade – on a complex subject. The researchers, for example, give short shrift to what is probably the most important issue that faces serious policy makers tackling drug-cost question: the impact of prices on innovation. The U.S. set a new record last year for drug approvals, and the number of new sophisticated biological products jumped from 10 in 2014 to 24 in 2018. Many of these approved medicines target the worst diseases, especially cancer. The Ways and Means report is clearly meant to provide ammunition for those in Congress (and even in the Administration) who want to force foreign price controls onto the U.S. system. But if that happens, how will innovation be funded? Who will provide the capital to develop the pill that cures Alzheimer’s or AIDS or that extends the life of cancer patients? As we pointed out in Newsletter No. 52, after examining health spending in the U.S. and other rich countries last year, three Harvard researchers, including Ashish Jha, the dean for Global Strategy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, concluded: “Although the United States’ high prices of pharmaceuticals are controversial, these prices have been viewed as critical to innovation, including U.S. production of chemical entities.” READ MORE HERE. |
What Others Are Saying"The anger directed at the pharmaceutical and biotech industries overall is misdirected. The single biggest driving force for increased health-care spending in the U.S. is the rising cost of labor, not drugs." "Even if pharmaceutical spending were rising as a share of total health care spending, but that rise was due to pharmaceutical investments driving down expenditures in other health care areas (e.g. a reduced need for more expensive surgeries), then it would still be inaccurate to argue that pharmaceutical spending is driving overall health care inflation." |
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Cost-of-Health-Care News (CHCN) was launched on November 30, 2016, with the aim of providing news and analysis regarding a critical public-policy concern: the costs and pricing of health care. CHCN is published by EAH Strategies, headquartered in Grand Rapids, Mich. CHCN is supported by Pfizer.